HiPaint: Sketch, Draw & Paint

Review by eFreeware

HiPaint is a drawing and painting app for Android tablets and phones, published by the developer of the same name. It arrived at the end of 2022 and has passed five million installs on Google Play, where it holds a 4.3 average from more than 62,000 ratings. The pitch is broad: sketching, illustration, art design, image editing and frame-by-frame animation in one place.

What makes it worth a second look is the depth of the toolkit rather than any single headline feature. The brush library runs past a hundred entries and the layer system borrows conventions from desktop painting software, which is unusual at this price. If you have been treating your tablet as a sketchbook for rough ideas only, this is the sort of app that invites finished work instead.

It is free to install, carries ads and offers in-app purchases, so the no-cost entry comes with the usual trade-offs of that model. The tool list reads like the full studio.

A brush engine built for customization

Brushes are the heart of any painting app, and this is where HiPaint puts most of its effort. The catalog covers the familiar ground: pencils, markers, airbrushes, oil brushes, charcoal, crayons, smudge tools and fill brushes, among others. That spread matters because it lets you move between a hard pencil line for underdrawing and a soft airbrush for shading without changing apps.

The more interesting part is Brush Studio, which exposes more than ninety settings for shaping a brush. You can build a custom tool from scratch, save it, and import or export brushes and whole brush sets. That last point is the one I would weigh most heavily: brush sets become portable files you can move between devices or share, which turns a personal library into something you keep rather than rebuild.

Pressure and tilt are supported, so a stylus that reports them can vary line weight and angle the way a real pencil does. Brush size can now be reduced, and brush opacity has a memory function, which suggests the brush workflow is being actively tuned. The native library also gained a brush set from gartzia artz.

Layers, masks and the desktop-style toolset

Layers behave the way anyone coming from desktop painting software would expect. You can rasterize, duplicate, merge and group them, rename each one, and choose from twenty-eight blend modes for compositing. Layer groups and clear naming are small conveniences that make a large file manageable, and the recent changes include work on keeping layer names stable when a file is reopened.

Beyond layers, the tool list is long. There is a vector tool, a liquify tool for pushing pixels around, clipping masks, a selection tool for isolating an area, shape tools with transformation, and a gradient tool with linear and radial options. Symmetry can produce mirror or kaleidoscope effects, and Gaussian and motion blur filters add depth or a sense of movement. Text can be placed on the artwork, and fonts can be imported.

Color handling goes further than most mobile apps bother with: RGB, HSV and CMYK modes are all available, and the latest release adds import and export for gradient mapping and color settings. Image adjustments include color balance, curves, HSB and gradient map, which is the kind of correction work you would normally associate with a photo editor. Image editing is one of the app's use cases.

Guides, references and help while you draw

HiPaint includes a set of aids that are easy to overlook when scanning a feature list but tend to decide whether an app feels comfortable. Stroke stabilization smooths shaky lines, which helps on a phone where the drawing surface is small. Perspective, isometric, 2D and symmetry guides give you structure for architectural sketches, product concepts or pattern work.

Reference images can be added and copied for practice, and a line art coloring assistant helps when you are filling in outlines. The painting process can be played back, so you can review how a piece came together rather than only seeing the final result. The navigator now shows high-definition original images, which is useful when you are working zoomed in and need an accurate overview.

These features point to an app designed for learning as well as producing. Someone building skills would get real use from the playback and reference tools; someone producing client work would lean on the guides and the adjustment stack.

Animation Assist and what you can export

Animation Assist handles frame-by-frame work with customizable onion skinning, the faint ghost of neighboring frames that keeps movement coherent. The developer lists storyboards, GIFs, animatics and simple animations as the intended output. That is a sensible scope: enough to block out motion or produce a short loop, not a replacement for a full animation suite.

Exports are generous. Finished pieces can be saved or shared as JPG, PNG, PSD or HSD, and PSD support in particular means files can move into desktop workflows that expect that format. Animations export at the full resolution of the canvas, and a painting's playback can be rendered as MP4 for sharing. The recent update also added support for new drawing tablet models, which matters if you draw on a tablet rather than a phone.

What the app asks of you

The app is free to download, shows ads and sells in-app purchases. That combination is worth going in with your eyes open: the purchases exist alongside the ads. The free download is the entry point.

On hardware, the pressure and tilt support only pays off with a stylus that reports those signals, and the canvas customization described by the developer, where tool icons are dragged into place, makes most sense on a screen large enough to hold them. A phone works, but the interface and the guides are clearly conceived with a tablet in mind. Newer drawing tablet models gained support in the latest release.

The other cost is time. More than a hundred brushes and ninety-plus brush settings are not self-organizing; building a working set takes deliberate effort, and the layer blend modes reward someone who already understands compositing. None of that is a flaw, but it shapes who gets value quickly.

Getting the most from it

Start by trimming the brush library rather than exploring all of it. Import and export of brush sets means you can keep a small, personal collection and move it between devices, and the opacity memory function added recently makes repeated strokes more predictable once you have settled on a few tools.

Use the guides early. Perspective and symmetry grids are easier to set up before the first stroke than to retrofit, and the stroke stabilization is best judged on the kind of linework you actually draw. If you are learning, the reference-image and line-art coloring tools, plus playback of your own process, give you a way to study your own habits.

For animation, keep the scope modest at first. Onion skinning and frame-by-frame drawing reward short loops and storyboard tests, and since exports come out at full canvas resolution, there is no need to work small. When a piece is finished, PSD export keeps the door open to desktop editing later.

A deep studio for tablet artists

HiPaint packs an unusual amount of drawing machinery into a free Android app. The brush engine, layer system, adjustment tools and animation support add up to something closer to a desktop painting application than a casual sketch pad, and the steady stream of updates suggests the developer intends to keep it that way.

It suits illustrators and committed hobbyists who draw on a tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus and want one app to carry a piece from rough sketch to export. It also suits learners, thanks to the guides, references and process playback. Anyone after a light sketching tool for occasional doodles will find more here than they need, and the ads and in-app purchases are part of the deal either way.

For the price of a download, the toolset is hard to argue with. I would install it, spend an evening building a brush set, and judge it on a single finished drawing.

What's new in version 6.3.7

1. Brushes by artist gartzia artz added to HiPaint native brush library. 2. Added import & export for gradient mapping and color settings. 3. Navigator now shows high‑definition original images. 4. Fixed bug: brush size could not be reduced. 5. Support added for new drawing tablet models. 6. Optimized layer‑name indexing to avoid name changes on file reopen. 7. Added brush opacity memory function.